Remembering Amazon’s First Prime Day: ‘Intimidating as Hell’

Back in 2014, Michael Boychuk began his career as the executive creative director of Amazon’s in-house creative agency. During his four years there, Boychuk, who co-founded and now serves as creative director at Seattle ad agency Little Hands of Stone, played a key role in the marketing strategy of the first-ever Amazon Prime Day in 2015, the introduction of the now-ubiquitous Amazon “Smile” logo, as well as four Super Bowl ads.

Amazon’s ninth Prime Day runs July 16-17. Other retailers have copied the concept, and several now offer similar sales around the same time. Shoppers are expected to spend about $14 billion this year, or about 10.5% more than last year.

 

How did the first Prime Day come about?

Boychuk: I was just a few months into my job as head of Amazon’s internal creative agency when I found out we would be creating a global campaign promoting a single-day sales event across nine countries. It was equal parts exciting, overwhelming, and harrowing. The event was so secretive that it was going to be handled entirely by our internal team. By the time it came to us as an assignment, the event had been signed off on by (founder) Jeff Bezos. When you work at Amazon you quickly learn that as soon as Jeff signs off on something, there’s no turning back. The focus and pressure to deliver on the highest level is a thing to behold. We immediately got to work developing a creative strategy that had to be presented to Jeff in Amazon doc six-pager format — no sexy PowerPoint slides or animatics. The idea had to be clear enough to stand out in a written doc. 

 

What was it like to work so closely with Jeff Bezos?

Working with Jeff and getting to present to him was a real treat, but it was intimidating as hell. I’ve spent my career making ads, and Jeff was famously skeptical that advertising provided any real value to a company. But at the time, Amazon was moving heavily into devices like Alexa and the Fire TV stick, after having epically failed in its first attempt at the phone market. So, by necessity, this famously anti-marketing company recognized that it had to get better at marketing. 

What Jeff was looking for in Prime Day was a repeatable format that would work across all nine countries it would run in that was culturally agnostic. He also wanted confidence that the campaign would drive immediate results and would pass the rigorous tests of Amazon’s internal measurement teams. Thankfully, Jeff was also looking for a campaign that would be fun. He knew that if the work ultimately didn’t make people smile, we wouldn’t get them excited about the event. 

 

What mistakes were made? 

It makes me cringe a little now, but our first campaign was an animated dancing Amazon box called “Box Man.” There were other, more nuanced ideas that were presented, but this was the one Jeff liked. Thankfully, the campaign performed well, enough to set the stage for an animated campaign called “Box World” that ran for the next three years. If anything, the initial work didn’t take enough of a risk. But as we built on that success, the appetite for risk and the confidence that the work would deliver results grew. 

 

What lessons did you learn that stick with you today?

Four years working at the most highly measured company in the world taught me to embrace data while at the same time not losing sight of the importance of emotion in advertising. I thought that when I joined Amazon I was going to tap my experience to help people there see the light of how a creative culture worked. But Amazon is a different beast. The more I tried to package up creativity to sell it with a slick agency-style ta-da, the more people rejected it. 

Things changed when I stopped turning my nose up at the data and started embracing it. To not just skim the brief, but to do the homework of talking to engineers and data analysts. Our goal as a creative team was to go into meetings armed with as much data as anyone else in the room. A sexy idea backed up by data is hard to argue with.